Quasi-immanants

Abstract

For an integer partition $ \lambda$ of $n$ and an $n \times n$ matrix $A$, consider the expansion of the immanant $\text{Imm}^{\lambda}(A)$ as a sum indexed by permutations $\sigma$ of order $n$, with coefficients given by the irreducible characters $\chi^{\lambda}(\text{ctype}(\sigma))$ of the symmetric group $S_{n}$, for the cycle type $\text{ctype}(\sigma) \vdash n$ of $\sigma$. Skandera et al. have introduced combinatorial interpretations of a generalization of immanants given by replacing the coefficient $\chi^{\lambda}(\text{ctype}(\sigma))$ with preimages with respect to the Frobenius morphism of elements among the distinguished bases of the algebra $\textsf{Sym}$ of symmetric functions. Since $ \textsf{Sym}$ is contained in the algebra $\textsf{QSym}$ of quasisymmetric functions, this leads us to further generalize immanants with the use of quasisymmetric functions. Since bases of $ \textsf{QSym}$ are indexed by integer compositions, we make use of cycle compositions in place of cycle types to define the family of quasi-immanants introduced in this paper. This is achieved through the use of the quasisymmetric power sum bases due to Ballantine et al., and we prove a combinatorial formula for the coefficients arising in an analogue, given by a special case of quasi-immanants associated with quasisymmetric Schur functions, of second immanants.